


Shadow of Him

by veryconfidentsandwichshapedfreedom



Category: Divergent - All Media Types, Divergent Series - Veronica Roth
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Age Changes, Alternate Universe - Crack, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Atheism, Between everyone I've shipped Drew with I think he's contracted every STD known to mankind, Big Gay Love Story, Blasphemy, Cheating, Coffee Shops, Crack, Crack Relationships, Crack Treated Seriously, Crack and Angst, Dead Peter, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Enemies to Lovers, Everyone Is Gay, Extramarital Affairs, Gay, Gay Male Character, Implied/Referenced Cheating, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, POV Drew, POV First Person, Sorry Not Sorry, Suicide, Suicide Notes, You'll probably need a pen and paper to map out all the shipping going on in this one
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-27
Updated: 2017-10-29
Packaged: 2019-01-25 01:29:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12519872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veryconfidentsandwichshapedfreedom/pseuds/veryconfidentsandwichshapedfreedom
Summary: Peter's suicide leaves Drew, his husband and lifelong best friend, in a state of emotional turmoil that's only exacerbated by the shocking secret Peter left behind—a double life, one that included Caleb, who's just as devastated by the loss of his long-term boyfriend. After Drew and Caleb meet to discuss their discovery, they slowly come to realize why Peter loved them both.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> i have crippling osteogaypression

_I'm sorry._

_It's selfish of me to do this to you when all you've done your whole damn life is give me what I don't deserve, no matter how I treat you. It's selfish of me to do this when I told you I loved you back. It's selfish of me to do this when I promised you forever, and now, I'm not giving you anywhere close to that._

_I recognize that._

_But do I feel guilty?_

_No._

_And that, Carrot, is why this had to happen._

_I'm terrified of myself. I hate myself. I hate everything about me, and at the same time, I love everything about me more than I ever loved you. I think you'd understand more than anyone how that's torture, and if you didn't understand, you'd probably still nod your sweet little head out of devotion, even when your glazed eyes gave you away to me. That's more than I deserve, and the more I think about you, the more it supports what I've always thought about myself._

_I'm evil._

_Leaving you like this?_

_Evil._

_Doing this right in our apartment, where you're going to be the first one to find me?_

_Evil._

_Only addressing this note to you when there's at least a few other people who've earned their own personal goodbye from me?_

_More lazy and impatient than evil, but still selfish of me, although I assume that's what they've all come to expect._

_Going through with this knowing full well that you can't live without me, and that this will cripple you more than I could possibly imagine?_

_Evil._

_I know I'm doing something wrong. I know I have the ability to stop right here, crumple this note up, throw it away, and go on with my pitiful existence like nothing ever happened. But after I've suffered so long, so hard, having to battle through every day living as me like it's a war just to breathe, all I ask for is the silence of death. An escape. A way to prevent myself from hurting anyone else ever again._

_If I could change, I wouldn't need to resort to this. I wouldn't feel bile rising in my throat whenever I say my own name. I could make myself as happy as you've been with me. I could be a good person, a person people would want to be, a person who helps others, and fixes instead of destroying! I could forget the last twenty-six years of my life and spend the rest being everything I've wanted to be!_

_But I know it's impossible. Every time I try, I justify it all to myself and fall right back into old habits._

_So, let me tell you again that I'm sorry. If there was an easier way, a pill I could take or a rehab I could attend or some book that could teach me how to quit hurting people, I'd spend every cent I have for it._

_I figure that I'll just let myself hurt everyone one last time. Then, once the aftershocks fade out, I can never hurt anyone again. The world will be safe from me, and I'll be safe from it._

_I do have one last thing I want to tell you, so I can die clinging to at least a shred of the dignity I never had._

_I've been lying to you for five years. Long, long before we got married. I know you'd never leave me for it, and you wouldn't judge me, either, but I can't pull this trigger until I write it down for you, because it's something my conscience told me not to do while my body went ahead and did it._

_I've been with someone else. My paycheck was always so small because I spent it on rent for a second apartment, and I didn't tell you about it. Those nights I had to work late? I was seeing him. Even the business trip last year was a blatant fucking lie. I stayed at his apartment with his sister for two weeks. I've talked to you on the phone with him asleep next to me more than once._

_He was boring, like you say you are, but in a completely different way. He's the kind of person who sits around and waits for the train to come instead of running off to find it for the thrill of sprinting alongside it. And, for some reason, that got me._

_There was an irony in it all. He fancied himself an intellectual, but he thought I was a completely different person, same as the man you know in name only. I faked paperwork, faked records, faked anything I might have needed if someone questioned me. I hid my ring in a bottom drawer back at the second apartment, and I lied to him just as much as I lied to you. He never knew I was married because society expected me to be committed, and I bet if he knew, he would be a good enough human being to leave me, for your sake._

_And I know it won't, because I've done worse that you haven't even scolded me over, but I hope me telling you that helps you get over this. I hope that it helps you see me as the cruel demon I am inside. Maybe I'll finally break your delusion that I'm good enough to have anything you gave me, and you'll quit caring about anything I do. My only wish is for both you and him to hate me more than I hate myself, but especially you, because after all you've done for me, I went and destroyed it all, stomped everything we had, everything you wanted, into jagged little pieces and stabbed you in the chest, over and over and over again, with the shards._

_I'm sick and this should have happened a long, long time ago. I just wish I never dragged anyone else into it. But if I could be the way I am and not affect anyone, I guess I wouldn't be writing this right now._

_Stay strong, Drew. I love you more than you probably think I do after reading this._

_Not that I know what love is anymore._

_I don't know anything anymore._

* * *

The notebook paper is heavy and creased, like the cloth of a well-worn dollar bill, in my hands; I've held it so many times over the past five days that whenever I put it down, I feel something's missing, like someone flayed the skin off of my palms and I didn't notice. It's transcended being a note, transcended being only words. It's become a body part.

I don't go anywhere without it. I hid it from the police, so they wouldn't take the last trace of Peter from me. I took it to meet the funeral director, the lawyers, everyone I needed to meet. I kept it in my pocket, and sat and stroked the back side, to comfort myself without smudging away the ink of his words. I took it to his funeral. I read it over and over again, at least a dozen times, while I cried in my friend's car afterward. It's all I have left of him. No matter how long he is gone, reading his words again will always be as simple as unfolding a piece of paper. Being with him, the love of my life, will always be as simple as unfolding a piece of paper.

But knowing why he did what he did will always be harder than that.

If he'd managed to convince me death was what he truly wanted for himself, then I would have been happy for him, as long as he was happy when he died, or at least satisfied with his decision. I would have hated it, but I would have accepted it. I would have moved on, knowing that he died everything I've fought my entire life for him to be.

Happy.

But he didn't convince me. He died guilty and scared and alone, guilty for things he did that were never wrong, scared of himself, and alone surrounded by friends, and if his note is any indication, two lovers.

I always knew I wasn't good enough for him, so it didn't shock me when I read what he'd done. People say that if things seem too good to be true, they probably are, and for the first time in a long time, I think they're right, because nowhere does that sentiment apply more than with Peter Hayes. The first time he kissed me, when we were in high school, after I finally wrestled up the courage to clench away the clamminess in my palms, battle the terror claiming my chest as its own, and confess to him how much I truly idolized him, spill the homoerotic fantasies I'd had about him for years, tell him I'd loved him so much and for so long that he owned all of me, seemed too amazing to be real. I didn't legitimately believe, outside of dreams, that he'd ever pay attention to me. He was some Hollywood heartthrob and I was just an adoring teenaged fangirl. It was never meant to be.

Yes, it was never meant to be, and so, it shocked me less when a girl I didn't know pulled me away at the reception and told me that her brother wanted to speak with me, but he had been too distraught to attend. She never told me whether it was over  _it_ itself, or the fact he'd only found out about _it_ through the damn obituary, the same obituary that gave him knowledge of my existence, but if I didn't have the responsibility to manage what Peter left behind, I would have backed away, too. 

I fold the note up along the creases, until it looks exactly how I found it. I don't like to remember  _it_ , a shame, considered that it's still so fresh in my memory, and likely will feel that way until the day I die.

Peter did  _it_  while I was asleep in his bed. He just went into the bathroom and shot himself with the gun he always kept in the drawer of the bedside table. I hope he died instantly. I've read about people who shot themselves and lived to tell the tale, or, worse, lived to lie in a hospital bed with no quality of life. They were always discovered quickly, though, and I didn't find Peter until morning, as much as eight hours later. The idea of him having lived through  _it_  and dying a slow, agonizing death from blood loss while I slept soundly across the apartment kills me a little more inside every day. 

I woke up that morning with his side of the sheet strewn about next to me. Typically, he would wake up, and I would awaken right after him, unable to sleep any longer without his body heat and his hot, solid chest to snuggle into. His side of the bed would always still be warm, and if there was time before I had to get up, I would roll over and lie awake there as long as I could, basking in the bits of his presence that always lingered behind and inhaling only the fading scent of his existence.

But everything was different. Unbeknownst to me for another few minutes, I had woken up on the dawn of the worst day of my life, the day  _it_  happened, and there was no way to imply what was to come next better than to remove my daily dose of him without explanation.

I assumed that I'd overslept; I haven't set an alarm since we moved in together, paranoid it would go off early and interrupt his sleep, and though I operate well on a strictly consistent sleep schedule, everyone slips up sometimes, and I thought, perhaps, it was my turn. With alarm pinching my throat, I leapt from bed like the comforter was covered in a writing mass of spiders, threw on the clothes I'd worn the day before, which were still scattered on the ground where Peter had shredded them off of me the previous evening, and darted down the hallway.

I spotted the clock as if by reflex, and I remember distinctly the relief that surged through me, concentrated in my blood, beating through my heart, as I read the time. I wasn't late at all. In fact, I had awoken an hour earlier than I would on an average day.

I suppose I remember it so well because it was the last positive feeling I knew before I was ambushed by  _it. It_ was the event that divided my life into before and after. _It_  tore me apart from the inside out, hacked at me with jagged talons until my entrails spilled onto the floor.  _It_ shook me and shaped me and changed me.

And I had no time to prepare.

Not for  _it._

The apartment was dead silent, besides the ticking of the aforementioned clock, and the steady sound of my own breathing. That was enough to turn my stomach. Peter was not obnoxiously loud, but he certainly made  _some_ noise just by existing. When he was absent, I never was too concerned—he slipped out all the time, for what was, in retrospect, to see the other man, but he almost always provided an excuse beforehand, and if he didn't, he'd have one ready as soon as he came home. He was meticulous with covering his tracks; I think that's the thing I loved the most about him, more than his muscles or his courage or his eyes like summer leaves. He always did everything to the fullest, and accepted no less than the best, no less than number one. He was a perfectionist who loved someone who was less than perfection, and I adored that in him, because I wanted to be his exception, and because I only ever felt as though I meant something when I was around him.

But something was wrong, and there was a feeling of dread creeping through my very soul. I could stand it no longer; I called his name, voice trembling, hard and sharp and terrified.

I needed _him_ , and I received _no one_.

When he did not respond to my call, my heart thundered in my chest, pressing hard enough into my sternum that I swore it would be left bruised.

Despite my reaction, that was normal. It was not the first time he'd neglected me, and, had  _it_ not happened, I doubt it would have been the last.

He stood me up on what should have been our first date, back in high school. I waited for six hours, well into the night, on an evening in January. My cheeks stung and my fingers turned red, and I waited. The puffy gray clouds gave way to amber streaks of sunset, and then, to overwhelming blackness, penetrated only by the lights of the city, and I waited. It started snowing, and I waited. Every thump and every distant noise became the footsteps of an ambushing thug, and still, still, still, I stood and I waited.

It was only when midnight came and went that I finally gave up, knowing he wouldn't show up. He told me the next day at school that he'd gone out to do some soul-searching. 

I found out from my friend Molly that he'd bragged to her about having gotten out of being with me by spending almost the entire night hanging out with a kid named Al who he didn't care about, simultaneously leading both of us on, me as a lover and Al as a friend. 

I wasn't angry at the time, because I was too intoxicated with the thought of him even pretending to return my affections, but I think that was the kind of thing he always felt guilty over, the kind of thing which spurred him to do  _it._ But everyone screws someone over at some point, and I can't imagine how hard it could have been for him back then  _not_ to mess _something_ up. 

For him to give up on himself the way he did when he did  _it,_ though, took repeated incidents, an endless cycle of him hurting me, hurting others, beating himself up over it, deciding to change, relapsing, and then starting all over again. He's hurt me more than I should have put up with. 

But the frequency and the normality of it all didn't stop me from feeling worried, because he meant so much to me that whenever he was gone, I always assumed the worst had finally happened, that fate had taken me and torn me into pieces for entertainment.

I called for him again; when that, too, yielded no answer, on any other day, I would have assumed he had left and carried on with my business, but the world felt still, like someone had paused it all, and now, I was the only thing left moving, and there was something that wasn't quite right looming over me.

I stalked out into the kitchen to find everything as we'd left it the night before, when he'd grabbed me around the waist from behind and started kissing around the nape of my neck long before I had a chance to cook his dinner. That was yet another indication of something having gone horribly awry. Peter would have been hungry by morning, considering that, the night before, we had several hours of loud sex and went to bed early without so much as a single bite of food. He would have gotten something to eat, no matter how small, and left behind a crumb or a package or a dish drying in the rack, some evidence of his presence.

Every step I took got a little more difficult as my hope drained away. I didn't know what to expect, then, but the possibilities swarmed me in fear, no matter how inaccurate they ended up being. My first thought was that, after one final fling, he left me without so much as a goodbye, and in a few weeks, I'd get to check the mail and find out he filed for divorce. Our marriage wasn't in trouble; I still loved him, and he still loved me, even if he didn't always find the need to show it. But I was irreparably insignificant, blotted out by the great black shadow of beauty he cast around him, and I always suspected he'd abandon me for a life better than what I'm capable of giving him, a life more like what I would have suffered through anything to bring to him. 

But then I saw the bathroom door cracked open, and the pale fingers lying limp on the floor, and my heart shattered, and I screamed at myself inside for ever even considering the idea of him doing anything to hurt me.

I darted over faster than I ever realized my legs could carry me, but there was nothing I could do. Our bathroom was smaller than average, just large enough in length to fit two people standing with their arms spread, and just wide enough with the space left between the sink and the shower for a person to get through, and when Peter did  _it_ , he sprayed enough blood to paint the wall behind him almost entirely red, with chunks of his brain spattered and stuck dried on. I couldn't have saved him if I had a team of doctors right behind me. I don't know if he died immediately when he did  _it_ , but at that point, it didn't matter, because I knew he was gone as soon as my mind registered what had happened.

My first instinct was to say his name again, even though I knew, knew in every part of me, knew it like I knew my own mind, that he wouldn't respond, that everything we had was over. 

And when he didn't move, or speak, or leap forward to put his arms around me and tell me it was a horrible, horrible joke, and that he was sorry he scared me so much, I didn't let the hollowness of that one word cross my lips again. I fell to my knees, which still carry the bruises of collapsing onto solid tile floor, and I cried. I cried like the damn coward I am. I cried like I never had known how to, and I was left to lament a life's worth of sorrows all at once. I cried for every moment we'd spent together, for every thought I'd had about him, for every promise I'd ever made to him. I cried like everything I'd ever known had been revealed to be an elaborate hoax, because it may as well have; Peter was my entire reason to keep progressing through life, and even  _he_ had buckled under the pressure that had challenged me so, so many times, the pressure that I used  _him_ to escape.

I broke inside. I shattered. I shattered with an intensity I had never known until that point. My world was lying in fragments around me, and the epicenter, where the hammer that smashed it had struck, was lying in front of me with half of his skull blown into a gaping crater of flesh. 

I wrapped myself around him, oblivious to the blood oozing over my skin, drooling into my hair, soaking my clothes, oblivious to the blood that could have brought forward the possibility of something much, much more sinister having occurred.

I swore to him, knowing he couldn't hear me, that I wasn't angry at him, and I cursed myself out into his lap for not being able to break his fall, for not seeing the signs. I swore to him that I loved him more than life itself. I swore that I was sorry for whatever I did to cause this, and that I was sorry, too, for both the things I never did that he wanted me to do, and for the things I was never even remotely responsible for that drove him to this point. 

I screamed as the skyscraper of my emotions crumbled into rubble. I held what was left of his demolished jaw like the first time he kissed me, and I imagined that I could still see into his gorgeous eyes, that they weren't blown away by the gunshot I'd slept through like the useless lump I was, and that if they had gone through  _it_ unscathed, I would still be able to see the life, bright and soft, twinkling in their vibrant glow.

When the initial barrage of agony subsided, and I could think rationally, I spotted the gun dangling from his loosened fist, still covered in glossy bunches of congealed blood, and I thought about doing what I had done since birth, and following him. Following him to death, and to beyond, even if there was no beyond. 

But then I saw the note, and I knew I had to outlive him by much, much longer, so I could dedicate all the time I had left to keeping his beautiful memory alive, to spreading the word of whatever wisdom he blessed upon me as his final act of love.

I read that note for the first time, the note I'm holding right now, and it didn't hit me at first. It didn't hit me until hours afterward.

I left only to bring my phone into the bathroom with me and call Molly; I wasn't sure what else to do, and leaving Peter for longer than a minute was an act of bravery I was too cowardly to commit to. I knew the police would have to be involved at some point, but the last thing I wanted was a bunch of strangers jostling around Peter's limp body, the last shell of him that was less flimsy than the piece of paper in my hand. Molly was always stronger than me, and even between torrents of tears, she managed to be lucid enough to tell me to hide the note if I wanted to keep it, so it wouldn't be seized as evidence. I did it, even though  _I_ wasn't lucid enough to tie my own shoe without breaking down.

After I had sat there long enough to regain my composure, so no one but I would discover that my Peter, the most perfect person I ever knew, was married to a weakling, someone who would crumple without him in a matter of seconds, I finally called the police. I never wanted to leave Peter. If it could have been respectful, if his body could have laid there for the rest of time without so much as a single fly landing on it, preserved perfectly, and everyone would remember him with a fondness stronger than my own love for him without me having to work for it, I could have stayed there until time collapsed in on itself.

I _wanted_ to stay there. I wanted to protect him from the chaos and the judgement and the dim, cold lights of the morgue.

But just like the future I had planned with him, just like the house and the family and the drab evenings of our middlescence spent having too much champagne but being drunk only off each other, just like  _us_ , it was not to be.

And all because I made a vow to protect him all those years ago, and I failed. I swore when we were kids that I would be there for him, to be the one to pick him up whenever he was falling, to be the one to see him whenever he felt invisible. I told myself, though in a more abstract, juvenile way, as I did not understand the concept of suicide at the time, that I would be the one he came to when he felt like there was nowhere to go but out, and that whenever his bright eyes filled with tears, I would be the one to utter words wise enough to make them dry. All of this happened because of my personal failures.

No matter what anyone tells me, I'm not a victim of his decision. But that doesn't mean I won't suffer.

I'll always be suffering from the guilt that comes with knowing that, on some level, I'm responsible for his death. I'll always think there was something I could have said or did to change it. I could have taken more time to let him know how much he means to me; judging by the note, I was one of the few people he cared about, and if I had treated him better, perhaps he would have stayed. I don't know what I would have done, considered I already treated him like a prince, doing the cooking and housework, being willing to sacrifice a few meals to buy or at least help fund whatever he asked for, and following his every order, no matter how absurd or labor-intensive. I tried my hardest to make him believe that the world revolved around him. 

When the police finally arrived, and they moved around his body, and took his gun as evidence, and threw him in a bag that concealed him from me forever, my heart broke, and it did not help that, once I was cleared, which didn't take long enough that I would get over his death, though I doubt I could reflect on what had happened for centuries innumerable and ever be over what he did, I had to clean it up.

That hurt worse than knowing that he was dead.

The memories ache too much, the memories of how he used to hold me, of how he could change a bad day into a great one with little more than a smile, of the nights he spent at my side swearing that he loved me and me alone, the memories of all the signs I missed and all the times I could have said something to try to prevent it, had I known, so I block them out and heave myself off my bed. 

 _My_ bed.

I remember when I could call it  _our_ bed, Peter's and mine. That's what losing a spouse is. The things we shared together, the things that were an  _ours_ , have now become a  _mine,_ all through the piercing agony of death.

It's funny how trying to ignore the sad thoughts in my head, trying to blot them out, only seems to influence them to rebound and regrow with a vengeance, a further motivation to destroy me. It's funny how it's all triggered by the most mundane little things, like the bed, like the glass on the nightstand that he used to keep full of water for if he woke up thirsty at an ungodly hour sitting empty without him around to keep it filled. It occurs to me that I should move it, put it back in the cupboard, but I'm not sure if its absence will be better than its presence, so I shift the note into the front pocket of my shirt and pick it up again.

I used to fill this very same glass for Peter every evening. I used to take it first thing after I got home from work, and bring it back to the bedroom for him, full, as it should be.

Maybe if I leave some water in it, leave it standing where it has always been, where it  _belongs_ , or would, if he were still around, I can trick myself, if only for a moment, into believing he's still around.

That will be my final task before I set out. The night after Peter's funeral, I got a text from an unknown number, asking me to arrange a time to at a popular coffee shop a neighborhood away. The girl I met at the funeral reception, the other man's sister,  _had_ taken my number, after all; there was no reason for her to do so, unless she intended to give it to him. 

I was intrigued, when I figured out who it was. I didn't think the other man would care about me. Sure, his sister had  _said_ he wanted to meet, but I didn't really think she had meant it. A funeral is practically a four-way intersection of insincere remarks, and I had just thought it was yet another one. But he'd really wanted it, in the end, and though I'm still not sure whether I want to yell at him for being with Peter, and for being too much of a coward to show up to his  _fucking funeral_ , or try to befriend him so that we may bond over the loss of the shining beacon of beauty that has now retracted itself from our lives, I'm lonely without Peter, and upset, and scared, and if someone else can even offer help, I'm more than willing to take it.

The other man never gave me his name, but he said to meet at ten, early enough to miss the mid-afternoon businesspeople longing for a caffeine jolt to dull the agony of their overcrowded schedules, and late enough to miss the morning crowds shuffling in for a coffee and a bite to eat before work. It's an hour and a half before I should leave to arrive on time, now, and I had been reading Peter's suicide note again before I had to go, until I couldn't stand it anymore.

I do that a lot, now.

When I read his words, it's like he's still here.


	2. Chapter 2

When I open the door to the coffee shop, and see the walls made of thick cedar logs and the matching polished wooden floors, I am hit with the faint smell of vanilla carrying a hint of mint, riding the overpowering earthiness of coffee. I’m not sure I want to go inside. Small talk has never seemed so large; with so many conversations going on at once around the crowded tables, it’s nearly impossible to hear anything but the disjointed conglomerations of multiple sentences from multiple conversations led by multiple people, to the point where all I can make out enough to recognize as something familiar is the distant rumbling roar, one that would split my head in half if it weren’t fading into the background, of a grinder crushing coffee beans or ice.

But I’m not just going to stand here in the cold and stare inside like I’m having a war flashback, and now that I’ve walked all the way here, and I’m practically hanging half in and half out, I don’t really have a choice in the matter anymore.

When I come into the warmer, much more comfortable room, a room not littered with piles of leaves and turned bitter with an algid autumn breeze, unlike what I came in from, I pull the door neatly shut and begin to look for the man. I never got a physical description. I assume he’s fairly young, since his sister was around my age, and that he’ll probably be alone due to the embarrassing and disturbing nature of a discussion between a cuckold and an illicit lover about a man who committed suicide. But I don’t spot him, no matter how many tables I glance over. It seems everyone here came in a group, with the exception of an elderly, haggard woman with white hair and a maroon sweater who sits by herself at a secluded table wedged in the back corner, about six feet away from the side of the counter.

I take a few unconfident steps forward, still looking, but with my resolve fading. Part of me, the part hunting for any excuse to go home and ditch on this, shouts in my ear, over and over, to take the opportunity like it’s been handed right to me and bolt. Maybe I arrived early, before him, and I can claim I thought he was a no-show.

Then I spot him in the corner opposite to the old woman’s. I can’t see him well, but I know he’s young, and dressed in a tight blue jacket with a white undershirt.

The man has dark hair and fair skin, just like Peter.

I didn’t intend, before I arrived, to see Peter in this man. I _shouldn’t_ be seeing Peter, not here, not now, not in what’s in front of me, but I do, because, although different, they are too similar, and it eats away at my insides to feel as though a ghost lives in the fleeting resemblance.

As I scramble to find something, anything, that doesn’t resemble Peter, at my legs whines the urge to run with my pace unbroken by the tables I’ll knock over and by the stares I’ll get as I tear groups apart when I sprint right through them. If I had a choice in the matter, which, I do, barring the social embarrassment that would come as a consequence, I would run until my heart exploded in my chest and I collapsed, dead, following my Peter to the grave, just as it should be.

But seeing Peter in this man’s slight features and light skin tone is a double-edged sword, something that both draws me forward and pushes me back; I want to obey him, as I did Peter, because, no matter how hard I try, I can’t stop seeing Peter sitting in the man’s place, crooked smile spread over his face, dark brown hair gleaming, every single molecule of his physical existence beckoning me forward to obey his every demand. I can’t fight it. I can’t even put up a flimsy attempt to defend myself, a half-hearted swing of a fist or a playful kick of my toes. I can’t do anything, anything at all. I am so broken that there is nothing left for me but to saunter on as if there is not a single thing wrong, as if Peter is still here, right in front of me, and he’s wondering why I’m hesitating.

A deep breath sinks through my chest, and pauses, caught there; I begin to move forward before I can make any conscious decision to change my mind and race back home to cry myself to sleep at the thought of having to rejoin the rest of functioning human society after there’s been so little time for me to grieve.

Every movement must be premeditated, and the pain that seeps through my joints, as if they are begging me to turn back, to escape this, is unbearable, and I have to bite back a scream of agony, and another, of terror.

I am a coward. I have always run away. Even now; since I can’t run away from where _it_ happened, instead of dealing with _it_ , what Peter did, I keep doing silly, irrational things, like keeping the glass of water on the nightstand full, to hide from the overwhelming shadow of his death. It is not a literal interpretation, but it means just the same.

So what makes this any different? I am scared. I can turn and go and never come back, as always.

But I don’t. And I feel a little pride in that.

Instead, when I reach his table, I lift the empty chair by the back, in order to avoid dragging it across the wood and scuffing it or making a screeching noise, and once I’ve pulled it out far enough, I set it down and sit.

“You must be Drew,” the man says, putting out a hand, something that’s awkward both over the table, which has a glass jar of coffee stirrers and a black box filled with sugar packets balancing too precariously close to the edge, and awkward for the situation, because we’re former romantic rivals, not business partners. What a pretentious douchebag.

I hold my tongue and grab his hand anyway. He’s just trying to be friendly. Maybe he’s used to that kind of greeting, from where he works, or how he was raised.

“Yeah,” I reply. Even that single word feels unnatural, like it was manufactured and programmed into me.

The man shakes, careful to keep his arm high, as not to disturb anything on the tabletop. I grasp his hand a little firmer, uncomfortable, and shake alongside him. He lets go first.

I couldn’t see them from afar, but he has vibrant green eyes, that, while a shade lighter than Peter’s, and tinged with a hint of blue, summon bile to bubble up in the back of my throat, hot and threatening to choke away my air. Yet another similarity. Yet another reason to break into pieces and cry.

“I’m Caleb,” he says. “I’m… you probably know, don’t you?”

“Yeah.”

I’d shoot a puppy for the ability to use a larger vocabulary than that, but my brain is waterlogged and my tongue feels limp, and that word seems to be the only one that I can bring myself to utter.

“I know it’s too soon, but I figured you might need help now.” Caleb pauses. “You know, we both had a thing for him, so it only makes sense to try this.”

A thing? A _t_ _hing?_  Is that all my marriage is to you, Caleb?

Take a long walk off a short pier, you dick.

“I was his husband,” I remind him, with a growl in my voice that is so low, so subtle, that I doubt he’ll pick it out over the background noise. “I’d say it was a bit more than a thing.”

“I suppose you’re right. And I’ll just reassure you right now that I never knew about you. He called me by your name once, accidentally, but he told me you were an old ex…”

That pause, the way he trailed off… is he jealous? I’m not sure if I want him to be or not.

At least Peter never was attached to Caleb enough to screw up _my_  name.

Before we can say anything more, a woman calls out for Caleb, and he glances up from me, toward the counter. When he rises and starts away, I keep my head down, staring at the smooth, glossy wooden planks of the tabletop and studying the swirls in the russet color of the wood and the shallow rut between each plank where they come together. Even the furniture seems to be hipster; hopefully the coffee doesn’t come in a Mason jar.

Not that it would matter if it did. There’s little that annoys or saddens me now that isn’t related to Peter directly or indirectly. I’m not sure if it’s because he occupies my mind so much, diverting the parts of my brain necessary to dislike things into focusing on his death instead, or if it’s just a part of the numbness I feel to everyone and everything that isn’t him or discussing him, but it’s both a blessing and a curse. I don’t need the stress of hating things on top of the stress of losing my love too early, but if I did feel hatred for something that didn’t link back to Peter, I might feel real again, instead of just like a robot designed to imitate the stages of human grief.

Caleb comes back, one drink in each hand, and thankfully, there’s not a Mason jar in sight, just white Styrofoam sandwiching the thicker pad of yellow Styrofoam around the middle of the cup.

“I just got you black,” he says, with a dullness in his eyes that I can’t quite identify, as he offers one of the cups to me. “I thought it would be easier to convince you into letting me pay if I ordered for you, but I forgot to ask what you wanted.”

“I don’t really drink coffee, but I want to feel like a real person again, and I’ll try anything that could work.” I take the cup from his hand. For once, I detect some sense of camaraderie with him, like I’ve known him for years, and we’ve already bonded over our shared affection for Peter. Maybe he’s magic, or maybe coffee does something to help break the ice. I guess coffee shops _are_ becoming more common as first dates.

He’s lucky I don’t want to rip his mouth off his face anymore.

Caleb sits back down and crosses his legs at the knee. Setting the coffee ahead of him, he then grabs one of the thin red plastic stirrers from the glass jar at the side of the table and dips it in, beginning to stir absentmindedly. I don’t like the way he looks at me while he does that, as if he’s waiting for me to confess to something he already knows that I did.

In an effort to convince him to speak first, I take a sip of coffee. It tastes like dirt with a bit of acid mixed in, but, then again, so does everything right now. I could be drinking a fine wine that costs more per bottle than I’ll make in three lifetimes and it would still be foul. Since Peter died, I find no pleasure in food or drink, and I just don’t care enough to see it as a problem.

“How have you been?” he asks. He takes a drink, much longer than mine, like he has no sense of temperature in his mouth. Eyes wide with interest, he sets the cup down again and goes back to stirring. I will knock that godforsaken stirrer out of his filthy whore hand if he keeps looking at me like that.

“You want the short answer or the long answer?”

“Preferably, the long answer, but whatever you’re comfortable with.”

I take a deep breath.

“Shit.” I sip again. Still gross. The warmth is comforting enough to keep me going back for more, but I think I’ll take a break for a while and let my taste buds recover from their brutal assault.

Caleb sighs, a mirror of my breath, a shadow of me. Peter loved us both because we are too alike for our own good, with differences just numerable enough to keep him entertained with the both of us. At least, that’s my guess, but my guesses have, at best, been worth a handful of dry, clumpy dirt.

But when Caleb says nothing, I take that as an indication to continue, even though I want to do anything but.

“It’s hard. I feel so empty without him, like he was the one block that held my tower together, and now, someone’s pulled him out and everything’s toppling down on me.”

“I miss him,” Caleb states, monotone. There’s nothing in his voice, and he sounds as hollow as I feel. Did he not love Peter at all, or is he just emotionally disconnected?

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore…” My voice peters out. I don’t want Caleb to comfort me, to treat me like the pathetic depressed child I am, so I continue, changing the subject. “How did you two meet? I’m just curious.”

“At a bar, years ago. He came up to me and told me it was his first time out alone being legal to drink, and that he’d be glad to buy his first drink for someone else for me. I was flattered. We hit it off so fast that I took him back to my apartment, and that started things. What about you?”

“I don’t really know,” I say. “He’s just sort of… been there. We grew up together.”

“That’s interesting. Usually, there’s no attraction between childhood friends. Your brain recognizes them as a sibling to prevent incest.”

“Peter was different. We both know that.”

“He was,” Caleb replies, the sadness that trickles through his words still managing to be obvious even in such a short sentence.

There’s a long silence. Caleb sips his coffee. I stare at my hands, lying on the surface of the table.

I wish Peter were here right now, to scoop both of us up and comfort us, then drop Caleb on the ground and let me carry him off into the sunset while Caleb’s screams of horror behind us fade into a distant echo of cries, and then, complete nothingness.

Caleb’s been nice so far, with the exception of some poor phrasing choices. I shouldn’t be feeling this way about him. If Peter felt anything positive for Caleb, viewed him as a relationship as casual as a friendly acquaintance or as deep as a committed lover, then I shouldn’t pick on him, even in my own mind, just to act out upon my jealousy.

What should I say? I know I need to say something. I know I need to distract myself, before I snap on him for no rational reason. But what do I do?

“I just wish he didn’t kill himself. I wish it was an accident or something.”

Maybe too real. There would be pain in Peter’s death, enough to equal this, but at least I would be free of the guilt of thinking it was my fault, and I wouldn’t have gotten the note that let me find out about Caleb in the first place. I could think of it all as an unfortunate turn of fate, and not an intentional act of self-harm, and I could remember Peter as a faithful husband as well as a perfect best friend.

"Grief is complicated," Caleb says stiffly, as if the thought had never occurred to him to be upset.  "When you think it's going to present itself to you in one form, and you spend every bit of energy you have to defend yourself from it, it laughs as it strikes you in a place you were not expecting it to."  
  
I can't relate to that.  
  
Maybe he sees it differently than I do, but I don't understand. Grief is grief. It's all agony, and there's nothing you can do but ride through the storm when it hits. If we could have seen the future, known what Peter was going to do, perhaps Caleb's words would be worth agreeing with. But there wasn't any way to predict Peter. He was unpredictable, wholly, completely, entirely, as a defining—  
  
What if Caleb _knew_?  
  
What if Caleb saw the signs I missed like they were stapled to Peter's forehead?  
  
Maybe Caleb had this connection with him, one I could only imagine possessing in my most outlandishly idealized fantasies, and they were so close that Caleb understood everything about Peter, that Caleb could transcribe every thought passing through my love's head just by the way his eyebrows twitched or the glint in his shining eyes, that Caleb was his soulmate and Peter kept me only because he found me first and was stuck with me.  
  
The stab of splitting, throbbing pain that jabs my chest screams to me in a voice too loud to ignore that I don't want to be here anymore.

Ever since I found out, I told myself _I_  was the favorite, that I and I alone knew Peter better than anyone else could have. I told myself that Caleb was a toy, something Peter took to entertain himself. I told myself that nothing Caleb did could even approach eclipsing Peter and I, lovers for as long as we understood what being lovers meant, that Caleb never could have done anything to destroy the firm, unwavering connection of our marriage.  
  
But he has things to say that never would have occurred to me. He's profound and educated in his thoughts, like what he's saying comes right off of a script written in his mind, one he's had countless hours to rehearse. And, now, his indirect admittance of knowing about Peter's suicidal tendencies has been revealed, and it leaves me with the feeling that perhaps, Peter was meant for Caleb, someone who could predict the unpredictable in him.  
  
I can't think of anything to share that will fight away that budding insecurity, so, instead, I take another sip of my coffee, which is still disgusting; the condensed essence of God himself would taste vile in my mouth right now.  
  
Fuck it.  
  
If Caleb is going to try to build himself up by acting all stoic when he couldn't even be bothered to grieve for the man whom he claims to have loved and understood more than I did, I'm going to break him back down.  
  
"Of course, you could prepare for it," I hiss back, in a mockingly matter-of-fact tone which leaks venom. "I bet being his _s_ _ide bitch_  really gave you a deep intellectual connection with him."  
  
There's a flood of hurt and anger that rushes into Caleb's eyes, followed tightly by a blazing, defiant fire, a protest at being labeled what he was to Peter, at being confronted with facts to shatter his illusion that he meant anything.  
  
He did, he did, and I can't do anything but beat him until he doesn't remember, so I don't have to live with his memory of it.  
  
"What he did was _his_  fault. I didn't know," Caleb says, picking up his coffee and bringing it to his mouth as if he's about to drink before setting it back down onto his napkin. "If anything, you should be angry at him, and you shouldn't be angry at the de-"  
  
He trails off.  
  
"Say it," I hiss, raising my voice.  
  
"What?"  
  
"Say he's dead. I want to see the pain in your eyes."  
  
I don't know what or how to feel anymore. Caleb isn't responsible. I know that. I shouldn't be mad at him. I shouldn't be punishing him for tainting Peter's flawless memory in my mind, but I can't help seeing Peter as flawless, and to hear Caleb blaming him, and the suggestion that I should do anything to scorn Peter, so soon after Caleb, intentionally or not, implied Peter loved him more, is more than enough motion to the stir the boiling pot of emotions within me until they splash out. Peter’s death has been mine to bear, a marker of failure on my part, immense failure that weighs me down and leaves me broken, and Caleb doesn’t realize it, but he’s thrown more weight on my shoulders and I am not going to lie back and take it. I want to see Caleb suffer. Then, I will leave. We will never need to speak again, and I can forget the mistake I made by coming here. Peter won’t be badmouthed in front of me, ever, and everything will be perfect.  
  
Caleb stays silent, like he's considering something, weighing his options; he frowns as he meets my gaze, strong, unflinching.  
  
"It's hard, I know. You just want to blame something at this stage, and I am a good target to you.”  
  
He glances away, out the window, into the light and the freedom of the place where I long to be, where I can be free of him. Regret lingers in the way he frowns, the way his features, more cute than handsome, droop downward like they’ve been scolded. Then he looks back at me, the way he bites his lip screaming that he's waiting for a malicious response.  
  
"Quit acting like you don't care. I know you do,” I say.  
  
"I never said that I don't care.” It’s more stern, more serious, than he was before, his voice the rattle of a rattlesnake with its fangs bared and its coiled body primed to attack. "I do. But I don't see a point in weighing myself down with it all."  
  
"Weighing yourself down, huh?" I rise from my seat, and with my palm against the sturdy wooden back, I half-push, half-throw the chair back into the table.  
  
I am being too loud, in words and in actions; the crowds around us freeze into silence, eyes caught on me, a disturbance even among the rest of the rowdy noise that once filled the room until it licked at the rafters. It's an unfamiliar feeling, both the attention itself and the annoyance engulfing it, and, in turn, me.  
  
Peter was the kind of person to bring every eye in a room onto him. He was kind and brave and clever, with a handsome youthfulness touched to his features that was outweighed only by his staggeringly charming charisma. If he wanted something, he got it, usually without much effort on his part. People swarmed him like adoring fans. I was so lucky to have him, because this was the level of attention he received when he just lived his daily life in public, and for him to choose _me_  over everyone else was a privilege and an honor.  
  
But there was never this much irritation in the attention. It's the kind of irritation, from others, that converts itself to embarrassment as soon as it sinks down from the stiff air to soak into my skin until it is hot with the pressure of it all. An inferno blazes in my cheeks, but I'm seeing more red than what the color of my skin is right now. I’m going to rip Caleb into pieces, humiliate him, and find my peace.

“Text me again when my reason to live isn’t just a fucking _burden_  for you to carry around.” I pick up my coffee cup around the base and lift it to my chest, as if I’m about to leave holding it and deliberately try to splash and stain my shirt while I walk out. “Text me again when you quit acting like you’re better than grieving. Your sister told me why you didn’t come to his funeral, you asshole!"

But when I tighten my grip on the yellow Styrofoam of the cup, ready to throw it, and burn him, and leave him so scarred that no man will ever want him again, before any of that happens, I see Peter in front of me, just as I did earlier. Right now, he’s slinking back in Caleb’s seat, with wide, panicked eyes bulging to the size of dinner plates and trembling fingers and heaving sides, terrified by my aggression.

Peter has never been scared of me before, not even as a joke, and I can’t bring myself to hurt him.

And something tells me that I couldn’t bring myself to hurt Caleb, either, even if he was dark-skinned and blue-eyed and gray-haired, with no resemblance between him and Peter. Peter loved him. I loved Peter. To prove that I did, I will set aside this vendetta and let Caleb go free.

It’s what Peter would have wanted from me.To take his letter at face value means admitting three things to myself.

The first is that Peter loved me. That one was true. The way he used to kiss me while he made love to me was too passionate, too gentle, especially for someone as rough and abrasive as him, to mean anything but love. The gleam in his vibrant green eyes when we exchanged vows, the nights we spent up until dawn planning our future together, all the things I did to please him and all the praise that came with it—love. It was all a sign of love.

The second is that, no matter how much I try to yell Caleb into submission, Peter loved Caleb, too.

The third is that I have every right to hate Caleb, as long as I don’t hurt him or do anything Peter would be cross with me for doing because of that hate.

I set the coffee back down on the table.

“Caleb?”

Now, in Peter’s place, I see Caleb, once again, and my heart flutters wildly in my chest, like the rage inside me, acute and scorching, thunders behind my ribs. Caleb glances away, a display of submission, of fear; I feel something rising in me.

“Please,” Caleb chokes out, a cry for mercy. Around me, there is still silence. I’m surprised no one has gotten up to help him.

Then again, I’m not. Without Peter around to act as an obvious counter to cynicism, to prove that something, someone, is right with the human race, there is no reason to assume that anyone will try to take the route of a hero and intervene, except maybe the staff, and even then, they’ll probably just call the police instead of breaking up our fight themselves.

“I wish it were you.”

It’s not a lie, really. If I thought Peter had wanted to die, I wouldn’t have said it. But right now, to be given the choice between killing the man who was my husband, and my lover, and my best friend since we were kids, and a near-stranger who keeps making remarks about him and acting like a hypocritical, self-righteous asshole despite all I know about him, all the truth I could spill about what his sister told me, I would choose the latter with no hesitation.

I stomp away and out the door with every breath of air bringing blazing fire into my lungs. Relief floods my world as the people around me release their stares, and gradually, even as I get further away, I can hear the chatter picking back up and carrying through the door I left open behind me. Maybe they’re talking about me, how angry I was. Maybe they’re comforting Caleb.

Disgusting.

As far as I’m concerned, _Caleb_ did this. It’s the only assumption with evidence to back it all up. Peter was probably fine up until he met Caleb! Caleb must have convinced Peter that he was cruel and worthless so that when he finally killed himself over the guilt, Caleb himself could use him for sympathy. But he hadn’t realized Peter had gone off and gotten married to someone else only about a year or so into their relationship, effectively cheating him out of the spoils and the image of the poor, sad little boyfriend, and now, he’s trying to make good with me so he can at least be the dependable best friend to the sorrow-ravaged widower.

Fuck Caleb, and fuck everyone. All I want is Peter back. I would slaughter every other person on this whole fucking Earth, one by one, just to brush my hand up against his one last time. I would cut myself open along the abdomen and pump acid into the gaping wound just to see his smile. I would give up everything and everyone I’ve ever known, excluding my consciousness, so I have to live with the loneliness of the void forever, just to get one last kiss from him.

Maybe it was a mistake not to shoot myself, too, because without Peter’s light in it, my life becomes too dark to navigate, and the only vantage points I have to judge where I am are the items he left behind him. I want to lose the dry toothbrush in the bathroom, and the glass of water on the bedside table, and the clean, folded clothes in the dresser drawers, and at the same time, I want to keep them as they are, so that I may pretend he is simply away, which may dull my suffering into a less acute, less severe sort of ‘down,’ my pain dulled by the false belief that he’s coming back for me.

There’s a billboard next to the office where Peter used to work at, and I only got to see it on the rare occasion I happened to be off my own job when he needed me to bring him something he forgot, which happened about once every eight months at the very most. Whenever I went, it’d be there, and displaying something different. Usually it was just an ad for a fast food restaurant or a new movie, something so normal to see advertised that the details never stuck with me for more than a few minutes, but, one time, some cult disguising itself as a religious organization rented it to display their prediction of the rapture, which was some date about five years from now, and seven years from then.  

Until now, I thought the entire thing was a stupid attempt to make money, and to drive the cult members closer together. I had nothing to believe in but whatever Peter wanted for me, and he’d never said anything about it, so there was no reason to accept it as anything more than the ramblings of an aging sociopath trying to use God to manipulate people. But now I think I know differently. Money is definitely still a factor, and so is religion, allegiance to the God who will have to _beg_  my forgiveness after what happened to Peter, assuming that the Bible is anything but a storybook for adults, but I think it’s almost the same as lying to myself that Peter will knock on the door one day and come home like nothing ever went wrong.

Life is miserable. Life kicks you down before you have a chance to get back up. Some escapist fantasy, whether it be an impending rapture that will take everyone to a paradise where they can meet their ancestors and walk alongside their idols, or someone who is dead and buried returning, is a way to hide from it all. They’re only different in details; the base principles, from the irrationality of it all to the doubt lingering over it like an ominous black fog, are exactly identical.

Before Peter died, I used to prefer cloudy weather. But all there’s been for more than a full week now, before _i_ _t_  happened, and after, are skies overcast with puffs of gray, mottled clouds like wisps of pale smoke, and I can’t separate the gloom on the outside from the gloom on the inside. Maybe the sun would repair me.

 _Nothing_  can repair me.

Peter was right. He _was_  selfish to do this to me.

Or am _I_ selfish not to accept his decision to end his life?

I don’t want to know. I just need Peter’s comfort, above all else, to be fixed, to get my mind whole again. It’s like someone cut off half of my body and expects me to just walk around fine, like I’m normal.

I’m not.

I just don’t see how no one else sees it. I don’t see why Caleb wants me to act like he’s my friend after all he did to disrespect my husband. I don’t see why the people walking beside me on this sidewalk are so absorbed in their own lives, and so eager to shove past me as I walk aimlessly at their pace. It’s like they don’t realize that they could lose someone they love, the someone who completes them, their soulmate, the only person they’ve ever even so much as _kissed,_ at any minute and for any reason. They’re oblivious to the impact of death, and of suicide, especially, the guilt that tells me I wasn’t good enough to persuade him to stay, when his existence is the only thing keeping me alive.

I just want Peter back!

A hard lump forms in my throat, the kind I get when I’m about to cry, and I can feel the moisture of the tears brimming in my eyes as they gather and plan to fall down my hot cheeks. My pace becomes more brisk, even faster than I was going before. If I put everything behind me, keep walking, I can either summon the willpower to hold back until I walk home, or reach the taxi stand I know is about six blocks away, get a ride, and try not to sob loud enough that the driver will hear me.

A woman with dark, frizzy hair carrying a brown paper bag brushes against me, and though I catch her out of the corner of my eye with her mouth open to apologize, I don’t stop. I could use the boost of knowing someone, somewhere, even if they’re a stranger, cares about me for more than their own personal ambitions, the way Peter did. But I’d rather be known as ‘the stupid ginger who stomped right on by when all I wanted was to say sorry’ than ‘the stupid ginger who turned to me and broke down and cried into the chest of a complete stranger for three hours on a busy sidewalk while cursing out every deity he knew,’ and I can’t promise myself that if I see another human face, I will be able to restrain myself from finding _something_  in the features to bring Peter into my mind and hammer my crumbling walls into shards of stone and bits of gravel.

After about half an hour of contemplation, early in which I finally decide to suck it up, save the money, and walk home, given that I’d already blown about a quarter of my yearly salary on Peter’s funeral, I make it to the strip of grass in front of my apartment building, and that is as far as I manage to go before I can’t hold on any longer. My hands unfurl; I drop the rope, and as I fall into the roaring chasm below, the condensated mists drool down my face in the form of warm, salty tears.

Even the grass looks sad. It’s more sparse than it’s ever been, tinged with patches and flecks of dull beige that give the entire tiny bit of greenery a sickly, exhausted appearance. It’s never been thick or healthy, but it was at least always a grayish-green all around, if not a little brighter. It’s as if it wanted to die with Peter, but couldn’t time it right.

Is that a sign that I should do what Peter did and end my life? I have no purpose without him. I feel so lost. I go back to work next week, in only three days, and though I’ve never been excited to take orders from anyone but Peter, I could at least find passion for my job in that I’d be bringing home money to spend on him. But I don’t even have _that_ , now. I could try to motivate myself by telling myself that if I don’t work, I’ll starve to death, but what sense would that make when I would love to wither into a sack of bones and die a painful, prolonged death as long as it meant I could be free of this misery, or, if the religious cult that predicted the rapture is right after all, see Peter again, in heaven, and spend the rest of eternity with him?

I’m sniffling and choking on my own sorrow, trying to hide just a little longer, as I make my way up the stairs, but when I finally get home, I go into the bedroom and flop down on my bed, belly-first, and I sob into a pillow. I hold it to my jaw, over my face, like I’m burying myself against Peter, and he’s here to comfort me. That is when the real rush comes, and, soon, I cannot even open my eyelids because I feel so drained and overheated. Every muscle in my body is sore. My throat is pounding with my pulse, rubbed raw with the irritation from screaming so loudly, so frequently, and trying to quiet myself by smothering myself silent with the pillow.

Seeing Peter in heaven. What a pathetic thought. God isn’t real. If he were, he wouldn’t do this to me, when he knows I’m too weak to bear this all alone, and if he exists, and still did it all, knowing full well that Peter didn’t deserve to die and that I don’t deserve to have to grieve over him, then God is pure evil, and I don’t want to be part of the same afterlife he resides in.

Fuck God for doing this or for not being around to intervene.

Fuck Caleb for pretending to be stronger than I am.

Fuck Peter for abandoning me when he knew and acknowledged that I’d be lost without him.

And fuck me for being a weakling, and for daring to even think anything negative about Peter.

Fuck me.

Fuck me.

Fuck me.

I’m such a worthless sack of shit without him by my side.


End file.
